At my current project I work a lot with Apache Spark and running PySpark jobs on it. For those who also want to get their hands dirty with Spark in combination with Python I can recommend this course at Udemy. It gives a broad introduction about Spark in general, the different modules like ‘Spark Streaming‘, ‘Spark Sql‘, ‘MLlib‘ and ‘GraphX‘, and how to use Python to make use of the Spark system.
It also explains how you can run your own cluster in the cloud with AWS EMR about which I wrote several post before. And no worries, after completing this course there is still lots more to discover about Spark 😉 but like I said this should be sufficient to get started.

As you might notice from my previous posts I am a big fan of Spring Framework. A few weeks back, for example, I needed to set up a REST API client to be able to test some things in our Development environment. By using Spring Boot and RestTemplate I was able to create this quickly. Unfortunately I ran into the issue that the API endpoint was using a SSL certificate that wasn’t supplied by a trusted ‘default’ CA. So in this case I wanted to switch this SSL validation of in the RestTemplate. Continue reading →

When you have a look at the archives of my blog you might notice that I haven’t written any blogs for the last few months. The reason was simple: lack of time. I had decided to not only renew my existing AWS certificate but take that to the next (and highest) level, DevOps Professional, and also get the more generic Solution Architect – Associate one. Two months ago I got the Solutions Architect one which was actually not that difficult. But to get the Professional level took a bit more preparation. Nevertheless last Friday I successfully took the (almost 3 hours taking) exam and got the certificate:
So with this certificate added to my list my collection of badges look like this:

Last week I wanted to try new things with ‘pipeline as code’ with Jenkins. The best way to try new things is running it as Docker containers. This way I can keep my MacBook clean and don’t mess up existing stuff I am working on (also see this article about what Docker can offer for a developer). Another big advantage by using Docker is that there is already a complete stack of Dockers available to set up the necessary tools. However, for some unclear reason this stack didn’t work on my MacBook (see this issue) so I took this opportunity to build my own stack with some Dockers of my own choice :-).
The tools in my stack are:

I recently bumped into my own post of some time ago in which I describe how to add a NAT instance to your private subnet to have access to the internet to install packages etc. Although this still works some time ago AWS introduced the NAT Gateway which in most cases makes life much easier.
In this post I show you how to set up the NAT Gateway instead of using the NAT instance. To get the same start situation as the original post I created this CloudFormation script that creates a VPC with two private and public subnets. When these are in place I can create an EC2 instance in both the private subnet and in the public one, as I also described in the original post. Continue reading →

This month it has been 10 years ago that I published my first blog post. The post was about Oracle BPEL which was quite hot back then. Of course lots has changed in IT since then but not my eagerness to learn new things and writing about them.
Last week I received a mail that my blog was selected as one of the top 40 Java blogs on the web (not sure if that is good as I was in the top 5 in 2015 :-/). But nevertheless I guess this is one of the reasons I am writing these posts: to help out others as other blogs are often helping me.
Another important reason is getting new assignments by showing others what I am working on. Besides starting to blog ten years ago I also started working as a IT freelancer. This blog brought me several freelance assignments of which the nicest one was a three week job in Mauritius during the Dutch winter season 😎
So I intend to keep on posting for at least the next ten years. There is still enough to learn as I notice every day and who knows what it might bring.

In severalprevious posts I described how to setup your Spring Boot application and run it on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Although this is a great step to go from a physical server to one in the cloud there is an even better step possible! Going serverless. That means no costs for any server and no maintenance or configuring of servers! That sounds good, right? AWS has made it quite easy to go serverless with the combination of AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway. In this post I will describe what it took for my Spring Boot application that runs on Elastic BeanStalk to run the same functionality serverless. Continue reading →

About me

Pascal is a senior IT consultant and has been working in IT since 1997. He is monitoring the latest development in new technologies (Mobile, Cloud, Big Data) closely and particularly interested in Java open source tool stacks, cloud related technologies like AWS and mobile development like building iOS apps with Swift.
Specialties:
Java/JEE/Spring
Amazon AWS
API/REST
Big Data
Continuous Delivery
Swift/iOS